FAQ

Are there really FAQs?

No

Why are you doing this?

Once upon a time, it was thought 8-bits was enough to code characters and life was good for people using English locales. But along came people who speak different languages that require many more characters and 8-bits was no longer enough. Thus the ncurses package introduced a wide-character library that could handle both 8-bit and multi-byte characters.

Currently the Arch package is a mixture of both the short (ncurses) and wide (ncursew) libraries. Given the wide-character version does everything the short-character version does and more, it would be good to remove the short character one completely. This should also fix some localization/UTF8 bugs.

Will this cause trouble building packages that look for the ncurses.so library?

No. A fancy bit of packaging will trick these packages into linking against the wide-character version. The two libraries are code compatible so there should be no build trouble (currently, only the wide character headers are packaged anyway).

Can help I test the new ncurses packages?

Yes you can, provided

You use the testing repo and are comfortable fixing problems

You realize that although everything is working for me, this could stop some packages working, hopefully only until they are rebuilt.

Look below for a list of packages I know need rebuilt. If you rely on one of them, then add a vote and wait for me to rebuild it.

How do I access the rebuilt packages to help testing?

Are there x86_64 pacakges?

Not yet. The previous ncurses PKGBUILD had extra configure flags in the x86_64 version compared to the i686 version to ensure backward compatibility with old packages. This seems a good time to remove that and so the x86_64 rebuild may be (slightly) more extensive.

Some packages need libncurses.so

Add them to the rebuild list below and I will update them soon. In the meantime you (should) know what to do...